


Rope Bridge

by pinafortuna



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: Case Fic, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Ghosts, M/M, Podfic, Podfic Available, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes, creepy children's choir from 1545, implied past child death, st martin's in the canyon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 04:58:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20109517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinafortuna/pseuds/pinafortuna
Summary: Doumeki grunts, and they continue to cross the comically rickety old rope bridge across the rock canyon, toward the – obviously – fog-obscured ledge to which Yuuko-san had seen fit to send them in the middle of the night. Up in Kawagoe. On a Wednesday. Watanuki is fairly sure he hasn’t submitted any homework on time since last August.





	Rope Bridge

**Author's Note:**

> This entire fic was inspired by the song choice in gryvon's beautiful fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135930
> 
> Podfic version is on the next chapter.

“This might be my least favorite errand to date,” Watanuki grunts, pulling his leg back up through where the crumbled wooden rung had almost sent him plummeting down the world’s most ancient and creepy boonie canyon to either certain death or something even worse. “Are we even going to be able to get back up this?”

“Are you afraid of heights?” asks Doumeki, because, obviously, Doumeki is here.

“What’s this got to do with heights?” Watanuki asks. “Even if I was – which I’m not! – all I’m _saying_ is this bridge can barely handle our weight as is! And it’s slanted _down_! And Yuuko-san asked us to bring something back, and who knows how heavy _that_ is going to be -”

“The person who always carries the heavy things is the one who gets to complain about that,” says Doumeki, and Watanuki sputters.

“This is exactly why I hate doing these things with you,” he snarks. “If I was with Himawari-chan, she’d be glad to _let me_ carry things once in a while!”

Doumeki grunts, and they continue to cross the comically rickety old rope bridge across the rock canyon, toward the – obviously – fog-obscured ledge to which Yuuko-san had seen fit to send them in the middle of the night.

Up in Kawagoe.

On a Wednesday.

Watanuki is fairly sure he hasn’t submitted any homework on time since last August.

He grumbles about this, only moderately loud, for a while, and Doumeki follows in what could have been companionable silence but instead feels like having an electric fan behind you, blowing pure judgment your way. Watanuki makes a mental note to ask Yuuko-san if metaphors can take on a life of their own in spiritual places. He’s willing to insult Doumeki in his mind and to his face alike, but he draws the line at turning him into anthropomorphized houseware on accident. Not least because he’d then be honor-bound to fix it.

“How long is this bridge?” Doumeki asks.

“HA!” Watanuki crows. “I _knew_ it, I _knew_ you don’t like it any more than I do -”

“Only it’s been too long, for how far it should be,” Doumeki interrupts, which is when Watanuki hears it.

_Tooryanse, tooryanse …_

“Besides, I don’t mind these kinds of errands,” Doumeki carries on, and Watanuki flaps a hand to shush him.

_Koko wa doko no hosomichi ja?  
Tenjin-sama no hosomichi ja …_

Doumeki raises an eyebrow.

“It’s singing,” Watanuki tells him. “You don’t hear it?”

_Chitto tooshite kudashanse …_

“No.”

“Suppose the eye situation won’t help here,” Watanuki says, wryly.

“I’m not giving you half my ear,” Doumeki replies, and “Who asked you to?!” Watanuki snaps back, but quietly. He’s listening.

_Goyou no nai mono tooshasenu …_

“What’s this?” Doumeki asks.

“A rat’s ass. What does it look like, idiot, it’s my handkerchief!”

“Why?” Doumeki asks, taking it.

_Kono ko no nanatsu no oiwai ni ..._

“It’s easy for you to be calm, you can’t hear the creepy children’s choir from 1545,” Watanuki mutters. When Doumeki still makes no move to put the handkerchief away, he sighs. “You can’t hear them,” he says. “Maybe you need something of mine to cross over. I don’t want to be trapped with St Martin in the Canyon for eternity while you run treadmill on a rope bridge for fifty years without noticing. It’s _just in case_!” he finishes, irritably, and Doumeki wraps the handkerchief around his hand, wrinkling the cloth so Watanuki will have to iron it again before school tomorrow, which, good god, will they even be back by then?

“Having it in my hand worked last time,” Doumeki says, cutting off Watanuki’s tantrum at the head. “With the hydrangea.”

_Ofuda wo osame ni mairimasu ..._

Watanuki looks down briefly. They haven’t ever really talked about the hydrangea, and he knows they should, but, dammit, he really doesn’t want it to be now. Then again, he never wants it to be now. That’s how they’ve gone this long without ever talking about the hydrangea.

“I don’t mind when I know what I’m getting into,” Doumeki says, finally. “Or close. I didn’t like the Angel game. And I didn’t like the hundred stories.”

“That might be more words than I’ve ever heard you say in a row,” Watanuki says. Doumeki grunts, clearly done.

_Iki wa yoi yoi, kaeri wa kowai …_

“Let’s go,” he says, and the two make their way through the rest of the rope bridge. At least Watanuki knows no more rungs will crumble under their feet now. If nothing else, they’ve been invited to whatever’s on the ledge.

_Kowai nagara mo  
Tooryanse, tooryanse …_

His feet touch stone.

Doumeki, thankfully, is still there behind him.

Dozens of bright eyes turn sharply to look at them.

“Welcome,” a small voice says.

“Hi,” Watanuki breathes. It’s children. Dozens – twoscore, three? Children. “Excuse us. May we come in?”

“Come in, come in!” they answer back, and Watanuki steps forward. “Can you see them?” he murmurs.

“Not without your eye,” Doumeki answers. He’d already checked.

“Who are you talking to?” a girl asks.

“You can’t see him?” Watanuki asks, surprised.

“See who?”

“Huh,” Doumeki says. “This is a first,” Watanuki says, at the same time.

“It’s all right if you’ve got a ghost,” the girl says, after a brief pause. She lowers her voice conspiratorially. “Everyone has one or two.”

“What are all of you doing here?” Watanuki asks them. It’s May, well into the muggy part of the season, but the children are dressed in lined kimono – and hakama, some of them – and he sees persimmons, leaves, interlocking circles, falling leaves. They're the common kimono patterns for November, he thinks, and wonders when he learned that.

“We’re waiting,” she answers. Watanuki doesn’t sense any malice in the word. It’s the sort of answer he might have given, as a child: honest, and satisfactory enough, even if it’s not really much of an explanation. It’s as much of what she’s doing as she knows, he realizes.

“And you’re playing games while you wait?” he asks.

She brightens. “You get it!” She turns to the others. “He gets it!” A boy pulls at Watanuki’s jacket sleeve. “Want to play with us?"

He frowns. “I think you’ve been playing your game a long time. Do you want me to teach you a new one?”

The children consider this a moment, until one tips the scales: “Yes!"

It’s a ripple effect after that, and in short order, Watanuki is standing, back to the canyon, and saying: “Red light! Green light!” with a bunch of ghosts from – well, jury’s out on 1545, but he isn’t Yuuko-san, and he isn’t going to be able to place them until she inevitably tells him what’s what once they’re home.

Once they’re _back_.

Oh my god, Watanuki thinks in a fit of panic, I just called the shop _home_.

Oh my _god_, Watanuki's mind adds, slumping in despair, I spend more time at the shop than I do in my apartment.

“You look so stupid right now,” Doumeki offers, sitting on a rock and fiddling with the handkerchief. Watanuki should have packed him an orange or something. Something to entertain the black hole that was his stomach so that he wouldn’t just sit there mocking Watanuki, who was, for the record, doing _all the work_.

Watanuki makes a face, then shouts “Red light!” very quickly, because one of the little urchins had gotten _awfully_ close.

The kid freezes in time. Damn, he’s good. Watanuki chuckles.

The child who had first volunteered for the new game wins the first round. Watanuki realizes there need to be prizes, and that he doesn’t have anything on hand.

“Take an arrow,” says Doumeki.

“A what?”

“An arrow.”

“You don’t _carry arrows_,” Watanuki hisses, and the children snicker at him, talking to his imaginary friend. Fantastic, even ghosts think he’s crazy now.

Watanuki hears the _zing_ just in time to jump back, and there in the moonlight is the shadow of an arrow.

“Ooooh!” he hears, and the boy seizes at the air, pulling his hand back with an arrow in it. It’s marked with gold.

“Flash bastard,” Watanuki mutters. Doumeki raises an eyebrow half a millimeter.

They need little coaxing to play the next game, and the next. When the girl who had granted Watanuki entrance to the ledge wins, she gives him a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” she says. Watanuki feels it on his skin, a warm brush, a buzz.

Then she gasps.

“There’s a man there!” she cries out.

“What?”

“A man! How long has a man been here?”

“What, _I’m_ not a man now?” Watanuki grumbles, then realizes they can see Doumeki. Maybe handkerchiefs took time to land you, or something. “That’s my friend,” he tells her. “He just took a little longer to settle in.”

The children don’t insist too hard that Doumeki join them in the game, but they do want to take a break.

“What’s a red-light, anyway?” asks a child.

“They hang them on the streets,” Doumeki says. “The lights change color. When the light is red, you have to stop. When the light is blue -"

_Green_,”Watanuki interrupts –

“– you can go.”

Suddenly Watanuki feels the air shift.

“Doumeki –” he barely manages to get out, but the children have suddenly turned to the rope bridge. “Doumeki, get back!” he shouts. “I said green –”

It’s less a crush of bodies than a billow of them, but either way, it knocks Watanuki off the ledge. _Time to find out what’s at the bottom_, he sighs internally, when his elbow nearly cracks out of his arm because Doumeki – of course it’s Doumeki, of course he threw himself under the stampede, of course he reached over the ledge, of course he caught Watanuki’s hand, _of course_ he can feel his own handkerchief tied across Doumeki’s palm like a goddamn bandage, and _of course_ Doumeki pulls him up when it’s all over, and _of course_ he collapses afterward, and Watanuki doesn’t even have time to ask him first what’s wrong.

The rope bridge is empty, and the moon shines down on a quiet ledge.

*

“And this idiot should consider not eating so much because he weighs more than an entire _building_,” Watanuki continued, “and I, Watanuki-sama, do not maintain my trim physique for this kind of – of _heavy lifting_, literally.”

“You should thank him then for all the times he’s carried you,” Yuuko-san says, and Watanuki sputters in outrage, but his heart isn’t in it.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asks.

“Well, when that many children run over your back, it’s only natural to throw it,” Yuuko-san says.

“Only natural! Only natural!” Maru and Moro echo. They’re pouring steaming water from the kettle into an old cloth-and-rubber hot water bag. Well, he hopes it’s rubber. Well, he wishes it were rubber.

“But he’s freezing!” Watanuki says. “He’s ice cold! And throwing your back doesn’t knock you unconscious!”

Yuuko-san smiles in that – well, _witchy_ way of hers. “He also became part of the path they trod on the start of their journey. Ghost feet affect the ground they tread.”

“Ghosts don’t have feet,” Watanuki mutters, and Yuuko-san smiles again, differently this time. “Exactly.”

“Look,” Watanuki sighs, “he helped me. And I know you’re going to get to this at some point anyway, so what can I – how do I fix it?”

“He needs the kiss,” Yuuko-san says.

Sure. So now Watanuki just has to head off, at probably-practically-dawn, and just fetch his idiot partner from god knows where a –

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Kiss,” Yuuko-san says, again. She taps her bright red lips with her fan.

Mokona makes a kiss noise as he hops up beside her.

Watanuki considers the scream he would have to make to justify the absurdity of this moment, and decides he is literally too tired to make it.

“The kiss of – what. Life?” Oh god, he is going to have to give Doumeki mouth-to-mouth, isn’t he. Oh, _my god_.

“She gave you a kiss, didn’t she?” Yuuko-san asks, leaning forward and running a long finger up his arm. “One of the children?”

He remembers.

“So when you say kiss,” he says slowly. “The – that kiss? I have to give him her kiss?”

“Just so.”

Watanuki closes his eyes. “Just tell me I don’t have to kiss his lower back.”

“It can be wherever you like,” Yuuko-san says, looking at him closely, in that way he has almost learned to filter out.

“Mercy be for small blessings,” Watanuki mutters, but it isn’t one, much. Where is there to kiss on this idiot, anyway? Every place he can think of is as upsetting as the last. The cheek, he supposes, where the girl had kissed _him_, but -

“Do I have to … say anything? Do anything?” he asks. He does not want to do this more than once.

“You need to give him the kiss she gave you,” Yuuko-san answers.

“Th- that’s not _helpful_!” Watanuki wants to wail, but before he can, he realizes, to his surprise, that it is.

He reaches out to hold Doumeki’s hand, heavy, cold in a way it never is. He raises it to his lips: thinks, feels, and then brushes his lips over it, dry and soft. _Thank you_, he thinks.

He can feel it when the kiss lands.

Doumeki starts to breathe.

*

“What was their price?” Watanuki asks, taking one of the chitose-ame Yuuko-san had set out. He turns it in his fingers, not opening it.

“Hmm?”

“For crossing the bridge. What was the price?”

Mokona pours Yuuko-san what is surely not her first sake cup of the night. Nor her fifth.

“They cannot cross back,” Yuuko-san says. “The price for the path forward was the path back.”

“Their _home_, you mean,” Watanuki says, slowly. “You took their home.”

Yuuko-san doesn’t smile. “The tengu wanted his mountain back. It was his home first.”

Watanuki remembers the guest from earlier in the day. At 6pm, after school. Which isn’t, actually, early in the day _at all_.

“It was their home, too,” Watanuki repeats, feeling a bit like he’s bleating. “They were children,” he says before he can stop himself.

Yuuko-san turns to look at him, and she gives him one of those rare gentle smiles, the ones that mean he has said something she likes, even if it makes her sad.

“Do you know what a ghost is, Watanuki?”

He assumes he doesn’t, for this purpose, and that she’s about to tell him.

“A ghost is a spirit that cannot move on because of an attachment to this world. It pulls them, holds them, and draws them. It’s a knot that must be untied, and it takes skill, and kindness, and –” she looks up. “Time.” She lifts the cup to her lips and drinks. “A ghost cannot both travel and have a home.”

Watanuki thinks on that, because that’s really all there is to do sometimes. Yuuko-san smiles again, and pours him a cup. Watanuki’s objection that he’s still underage is buried somewhere far down the list under, _it should be morning by now, I’m never going to catch up on my homework at this point,_ and _the moon wasn’t full outside the shop._

“So they’re traveling to where their attachments are pulling them, now,” he says.

“Yes.”

“And one day, when the time is right, they’ll be exorcised, one by one,” he says.

“If it’s meant to be, and as it’s meant to be.”

“Alone,” he says.

“Yes.”

He looks at the moon reflected in his cup, and drinks.

“Why did my game work?” he asks.

“Your game?”

“Red light-green light. Why did that set them free?”

“Time is not only a medium,” Yuuko-san says, stretching out her long legs in front of her, eyes still up at the sky. “It is a part of the fabric of the universe, like everything else. It moves, and shifts. It can be a barrier, as well as a link. As easily as it can carry you forward, it can block you, trapping you in place.”

“They had been on the mountain too long,” Watanuki says, slowly. "They got separated from the flow of time outside that ledge. That's why they couldn't see Doumeki."

Another smile.

“They play _tooryanse_ at pedestrian crossings, you know,” Yuuko-san says. “You taught them that when you taught them what street lights were. You brought your time with you when you crossed the bridge, and you connected them to it. That ledge had become like a rock in a stream, peeking above the water as it flowed across. It was removed from the flow of time, and so it became removed from the space around it that had been touched by time. They couldn’t cross the bridge until it offered a link across space _and_ time, until it offered them a path, not just to the world of the living, but the world of the future.”

“For them.”

“Just so.”

His cup is full again – thanks, Mokona, for the liver damage, assuming I’m sane enough to mind it by then, he thinks.

“You never asked that girl,” he says, instead. “The girl who was haunting her house, the – one with the bells. You never took payment from her.”

“The price to exorcise the house was its ghost,” Yuuko-san says. “The price to end the girl’s fear was her house. The payments were made, and they were correct.”

“But you - you never told her that would be her price. You _always_ ask people if they want to know the price. For that matter, she - wasn’t she a minor? A _dead_ minor? Granted, I don’t know how long she was dead, but developmentally, she was a minor! Is it even legal in, in, in _ghost law_ to make exchanges with children?”

“How old do you think I am, Watanuki?”

She’s turned to face him, and the smile is gone now. For one horrible moment, Watanuki is faced with Yuuko-san’s full gaze, the full gravitational pull of it, and he snaps his eyes away before the black of her eyes can pull him in.

He looks down at his cup.

“Age,” Yuuko-san says finally, “is relative.”

“You use the word child just like I do,” says Watanuki.

“There aren’t words I could use to describe the ages my customers are to me, not words or units either,” Yuuko-san says. “Why should there be?” She pours a cup for Mokona, who returns the favor. “The house and that child could be unlinked. They paid each other for the favor. I did not need more than that.”

Watanuki must be imagining it, but he thinks he hears – for the first time in, oh, since he entered this shop, he suddenly wonders if Yuuko-san does have opinions beyond amusement and withheld judgment for her customers. If she has preferences. If she has a – well, it’s absurd to wonder if Yuuko-san has a personality, she’s drowning in personality, she has such an overabundance of personality most people get pulled under by it, but –

“When does one become a space-time witch?” Watanuki asks.

Yuuko-san’s hand twitches.

Sake spills over.

She downs it, and turns her head, smooth and impish.

“Say those words again, and you’ll realize how little sense the question makes.”

“Still,” Watanuki pursues. “There must be a – before. However you count these things. Were you …”

He finds he cannot finish the question.

He can tell, before he finishes it, that the price to find out if Yuuko-san was a person before. Who she was, what she was like, what she liked, what she disliked, what her life was –

It’s a price far, far greater than having to work part-time at her shop.

“The moon is beautiful here,” he says instead.

Yuuko-san pulls her long, long, long hair back from her face.

“Listen,” she says.

_Tooryanse, tooryanse  
Koko wa doko no hosomichi ja?_

The sounds climb, climbing through and across the air lit by an autumn moon.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. _Tooryanse_ is an old nursery rhyme from at least the Kamakura period. Lyrics in translation: _Let me pass, let me pass / What is this narrow path?/ It's the path to Tenjin shrine./ Please let me pass./ Those without good reason shall not pass./ I go to celebrate this child's 7th birthday./ I come to dedicate an offering./ It is well to go, but frightening to return./ Even so/ You may pass, you may pass._
> 
> 2\. Leaves and so on are motifs for autumn kimono; persimmons are seasonal to November. The children's clothes are not only out of season, they're specific to the month of the Three-Five-Seven Festival, when children who turn 3, 5, and 7 that year are dressed up and taken to shrines, in thanks for passing survival milestones from the times of high infant mortality.
> 
> 3\. 1545 is the Battle of Kawagoe. Watanuki is right that these children don't seem to be war orphans, and he's not able to place them beyond, unhelpfully, knowing that 1545 is probably not it, but Kawagoe Castle isn't all that famous, and Watanuki should probably give himself credit for rattling off the date anyway.
> 
> 4\. The term for "green light" when referring to traffic lights in Japanese is, literally, "blue light," because language and colors are strange and evolving things. Doumeki is describing the color of a green light with the contemporary, factually accurate word for green, and Watanuki, probably just to be contrary, insists on correcting him.


End file.
